Amherst College - petersonhttps://www.amherst.edu/taxonomy/term/1151
enPeterson Compares Russian and African-American Soulhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/news_releases/2000/09_2000/node/9483
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="fine-print">September 20, 2000<br> Contact: Director of Media Relations<br> 413/542-8417</span><p> AMHERST, Mass.—Dale Peterson, professor of English and Russian at Amherst College, has just published <em>Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul</em> ($18.95 paper, 240 pp., Duke University Press, Durham), the first study to consider the evolution of Russian and African-American cultural nationalism in literature.</p><p> Peterson examines analogous moments in the formation of Russian and African-American uniqueness, and also explores the rather surprising affinities between African American and Russian thinkers and writers. He argues that many Russian writers and thinkers also experienced the “double consciousness” described by W. E. B. DuBois as an African-American phenomenon, while the creative response of African-American cultural theorists to the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin is only the most recent instance of a rich history of mutual awareness and artistic resemblance. </p><p> <em>Up from Bondage</em> has particular relevance for today’s globalized culture. “The Russian and African-American experiments in developing a supple literary articulation of ‘soul’ and in imprinting cultural ‘otherness’ within the forms legitimated by Western letters and philosophy offer valuable precedents for our increasingly decentered and diversified world of disunited nationalities,” Peterson writes. “Nationalists,” says Peterson, “might finally heed the call to a proud hybridity that Dostoevsky and DuBois issued to their people more than a century ago.”</p><p> <em>Up From Bondage</em> deals with writers as diverse as Turgenev, Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Maxim Gorky, Richard Wright and Gloria Naylor. The book also compares and contrasts the “New Negro” movement of the Harlem Renaissance with the Russian “Eurasianists” of the 1920’s.</p><p> Dale Peterson, who studied history and literature at Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in American Studies and an M.A. in Russian Studies at Yale University, has taught at Amherst College since 1968.</p><p align="center">### </p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/552">news releases</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1151">peterson</a></div></div></div>Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:56:31 +0000htsai109483 at https://www.amherst.eduConcluding Unscientific Postscripthttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2011fall/amherstcreates/wallace/node/361328
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="mediainline image-align-right"><span class="inline"><img src="/media/view/361278/original/147920740.jpg" alt="147920740" title="147920740" class="image original" height="368" width="240"></span></div>
<h4><em>The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel</em>, by David Foster Wallace ’85 (Little, Brown)</h4>
<p><span class="fine-print">Reviewed by Dale E. Peterson</span></p>
<p><strong>[Fiction]</strong> When a living author’s voice abruptly falls silent, readers, along with friends and family, grieve the loss of an intimate relationship and crave closure. David Foster Wallace left no note to assuage the pain and perplexity produced by his 2008 suicide, but he did leave, with apparent deliberation, a rich and troubling legacy for posterity to ruminate upon. Waiting to be found in his garage office was the workshop of a prodigious mind—multiple hundreds of typed and handwritten pages stored in paper and digital files and accompanied by notebooks and rough drafts indicating the potential shape of a massive work in progress. In a laborious act of devotion, Michael Pietsch—Wallace’s editor at Little, Brown—has assembled these rudiments into a facsimile of the text intended for publication as <em>The Pale King</em>. This ingenious fabrication gives “ghostwriting” a new meaning, and the result in no way coheres as a novel, but it does allow readers the satisfaction of eavesdropping on the last project with which the writer struggled. It is, in fact, a true legacy. We now can begin to appreciate what was on Wallace’s mind, what he left us to contemplate.<br><br>Well before the book was published, rumors were swirling that the author of <em>Infinite Jest</em> had enrolled in accounting courses and was seriously at work on a large novel about lives enmeshed in the Internal Revenue Service and its phenomenally boring routines. The main narrative focus of <em>The Pale King</em> is, indeed, on the inner workings of the federal tax collection agency at a moment in its history (the mid-1980s) when the modes and motives of the operation are under internal scrutiny. In the book, two competing groups descend on the Peoria Regional Examination Center in the aftermath of a directive known as the “Spackman Initiative,” which mandates a crucial shift in efficiency measurement from “throughput” to outcomes. The sedentary examiners, or “wigglers” (presumably named for their buttocks-flexing exercises), will no longer rise in status for rapid, impartial processing of returns, but for quick calculation of profit margins for the agency. At stake is a change in the federal ethos from enforcement of civic accountability to an obligatory accounting of maximum revenue streams, and this change results in an intra-agency war between advocates for professional civil servants and champions of computerized audits.<br><br>Into this contest Wallace thrusts a large cast of raw recruits and wily bureaucrats, all converging on the Midwest REC facility on Self-Storage Parkway, a destination whose name evokes the bureaucracy’s isolated cubicles, which are equally conducive to recreation or wreckage. It’s notable that the embattled rear-guard director of the Peoria office is named DeWitt Glendenning; this is an allusion to the title character in Herman Melville’s novel <em>Pierre</em>, who has the same surname and is similarly an outmoded idealist. In a striking digression—a philosophical dialogue conducted in a stalled elevator—it is Glendenning who cites the <em>The Federalist Papers</em> and bemoans the demise of citizenship and individual responsibility for the common good: “something queer is going on in terms of civics and selfishness in this country, and we here in the Service get to see it in its most extreme manifestations.” Wallace’s unfinished novel, like the IRS but much more broadly, examines what it might mean to be called to account for oneself.<br><br>In this new book, fans will find much that is recognizable. There is the same wild Dickensian inventiveness in corralling multiple characters and plots within an external system that encloses them. And there is no ebb in Wallace’s manic verbal energy that spills over the page in compulsively chatty asides and bloated footnotes. Critics have rightly noted that Wallace’s favored mode is a kind of parabolic realism in which exaggerated attention to detail and grotesque situational comedy combine to make a common institution (tennis camp, halfway house) uncommonly representative of a circumambient culture. True to form, <em>The Pale King</em> utilizes the numbing regulations of the tax code and the dull concentration required of IRS examiners to exemplify in a central national institution the inevitable challenge of overload and boredom that confronts adults swamped in an “information economy.” As Wallace’s evangelical recruiter of future accountants puts it: “Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.” Yet there is something different, some greater intensity in <em>The Pale King</em>. Wallace’s big book is much larger than a civics lesson or profile in adult courage. While it certainly makes a timely comment on the state of the nation and meditates on modern maturity, the manuscript that survives is a parable of many parts, a work of more serious ambition.<br><br>One of Wallace’s greatest gifts as a writer is his ability to depict, in all its hilarity and angst, the tragicomedy of self-awareness. His last writing displays a rich variety of mindscapes in which he captures the convulsions of minds in extremis. We are treated to many variations on the dazzling digressiveness of human consciousness as Wallace’s characters struggle to manage their attention span in order to concentrate on a task or evade a core anxiety. We watch with amusement and horror the awkward leaps and disabling consequences of intense self-auditing. Some characters undergo unwelcome incursions of irrelevant associations, while others cannot free themselves from personal obsessions or fixed ideas. One of the oddest cases is the Kafka-like young contortionist who harms himself in a futile attempt to kiss every part of his own body—surely a parable about the inevitably inaccessible self! <br><br>No character in <em>The Pale King</em> better expresses at a philosophical level the fundamental urgency and complexity of accountability than “The Author” himself, who intrudes twice in the book he describes as a “vocational memoir.” Wallace’s final project thus becomes, from another angle, an experiment in full disclosure by the real person as fiction writer. This is tricky territory, not only because the legalities of publishing fiction in America require a disclaimer of similarity to real persons, but also because Wallace, like any honest memoirist, cannot disentangle imaginative truth from experienced reality. So, whether or not Wallace actually was a “wiggler” in the Peoria REC facility after suspension from an unnamed college for paid service as a “ghost writer,” The Author is true to his vocation of inventing a multileveled parable about the moral and personal complexity of being “called to account” as a public citizen and a private self.<br><br>In a 1996 <em>Village Voice Literary Supplement</em> review of Joseph Frank’s four-volume critical biography of Dostoevsky, Wallace vowed to honor an older model of “serious” literature that did not distance itself from a passionate moral engagement with the messy struggle to reconcile values and personality. Although the parts do not yet cohere in an integrated “polyphonic” novel, it is not hard to see that <em>The Pale King</em> offers compelling evidence of Wallace’s commitment to honor that pledge. Like Kierkegaard, another bold explorer of the absurd contours of subjectivity, David Foster Wallace has left us what he could—his version of a concluding unscientific postscript.</p>
<p class="fine-print">Peterson, the Eliza J. Clark Folger Professor of English and Russian, was Wallace’s senior honors adviser in English. For his honors project, Wallace wrote a 400-page work that became the 1987 novel <em>The Broom of the System<span class="fine-print">.</span></em></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1151">peterson</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4064">dale peterson</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/5025">David Foster Wallace</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9713">Wallace</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/16446">The Pale King</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/16447">Pale King</a></div></div></div><ul class="links inline"><li class="sharethis first last"><a href="/sharethis-ajax/361328" class="mm-sharethis">Share</a></li>
</ul>Thu, 01 Dec 2011 18:36:00 +0000kdduke361328 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2011fall/amherstcreates/wallace/node/361328#commentsThe Start of Everything that Followedhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2009winter/dfw/peterson/node/97025
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="fine-print">By Dale Peterson</span></p><p><span class="drop-cap2">T</span>here he was, slouched in the back row among all the reversed baseball caps, unshaven and garbed in meticulously drab colors, but with blazingly alert eyes. It was his junior year, he was reading my syllabus of long American novels (“American Realism, Naturalism and Modernism”), and he suddenly took fire when I said a few less-than-complimentary things about Frank Norris’ grotesquely deterministic study of a gross San Francisco dentist, <i>McTeague</i>. In response, David wrote a brilliant, spirited literary defense of Norris’ odd coupling of bizarre incident and semi-serious philosophizing in that comic and despairing, precociously absurdist novel. That was the start of everything that followed.<br><br>It was my good fortune to be assigned as David’s senior honors adviser in English, probably on the basis of the relationship we had developed but also, I imagine, because many colleagues were reluctant to take on a creative writing proposal that promised to be (and in the end, was) a massive first novel in two volumes, totaling some 400 double-spaced pages! It was, at the time, a minor miracle that the English department accepted a project of such girth; the standard expectation for an honors essay was—and still is—50 pages of well-polished prose, and undergraduate novels were decidedly frowned upon. But David’s academic reputation preceded him, and his ambition could not reasonably be thwarted. Soon I was on the receiving end of a prodigious outpouring of imaginative fiction, struggling to keep up with the weekly stream of inventive language and ingenious plotting that flowed from David’s positively Dickensian genius for spawning new characters and newly devised connections among them. Reading the young Wallace’s copious drafts was a thrilling, dizzying experience as he wrestled wild tangents into coherent shape. The end result, <i>The Broom of the System</i>, was not only a <i>summa cum laude</i> performance (and companion volume to his <i>summa </i>thesis in philosophy) but also David’s first, very characteristic work: a large, rambunctious, sinisterly comic novel about the proliferation of systems and information circuits that enmesh his characters and our lives.</p><table class="table-align-left-gradient" border="0" cellpadding="10"><tbody><tr><td><div class="mediainline"><span class="inline"><span class="inline"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/95937/original/137580320_w.jpg" border="0" width="189" height="300" alt="image"></span></span></div> </td></tr></tbody></table><p>David was encouraged by his philosophy and English professors to go straight on to graduate study in their own fields, but fortunately, he was more encouraged by his own prolific talent for creative writing. After graduation he shared that talent generously with later generations of Amherst students. As a visiting instructor in 1987, he was already his mature self: a soft-spoken, sweet-natured man who wrapped his head in a signature bandana and carried a sharp red pencil to ward off grammatical and stylistic offenses. His readings on campus, like so much else about David, were legendary. His talk on the occasion of his honorary degree was devoted to the rather arcane but fierce battle between prescriptive and descriptive grammarians. It is a perfect distillation of David’s laser-swift intellect, ever-alert irony, playful wit and compassionate sense of the comic and absurd.<br><br>It is, of course, the person himself that I most miss. The tragic end of David’s life removes forever an irreplaceable presence for me and my family, so I shall close with a household anecdote: With great trepidation, David agreed to house-sit with our pets, an aging, ro­tund cat and a feisty cockatiel. Always conscientious, he warned us that he was wary of cats, but would do his best to be companionable. When we returned to the house, David was quite enamored of the cat and heartily despised the bird. It seems the bird, Lolita, was a spitfire, hissing at him whenever he approached to feed her. Years later, when I received my paperback copy of <i>The Broom of the System</i>, the cover featured a garish caricature of our pet bird, now renamed Vlad the Impaler in the novel. David had his sweet revenge in a typically witty manner, though I knew, my family knew, that at heart, David was himself a pussycat. It is terribly sad that he was too gentle, too vulnerable to go gently toward that ultimate good night that awaits us all.<br><br><span class="fine-print">Peterson is the Eliza J. Clark Folger Professor of English and Russian. The essay was first published in <i>The Amherst Student</i>. <br></span></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/177">in memoriam</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1151">peterson</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1609">English</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4064">dale peterson</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/5025">David Foster Wallace</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6927">Department of English</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9076">essays</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9713">Wallace</a></div></div></div>Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:26:00 +0000kdduke97025 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2009winter/dfw/peterson/node/97025#commentsDavid Foster Wallace at Amhersthttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2009winter/dfw/node/96248
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p></p><table class="table-align-right-gradient" border="0" cellpadding="10" width="200"><tbody><tr><td><div class="mediainline"><span class="inline"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/95936/original/137580310_w.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="300" alt="image"></span></div><div class="fine-print" align="center">Wallace in 1996, the year his 1,000-plus-page <br>novel<i> Infinite Jest</i> was published.</div></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="drop-cap2">“W</span>e have this almost religious need to believe in genius,” Mark Costello ’84 said on a Monday in late October. He was speaking in Johnson Chapel at a celebration of the life and writing of his close friend David Foster Wallace ’85. Wallace died Sept. 12, 2008, when, after a decades-long struggle with depression, he hanged himself at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 44. <br><br>The word <i>genius </i>was heard often in the days and weeks following Wallace’s death. Best known for the hulking novel Infinite Jest, published to wide acclaim in 1996, Wallace was a towering figure in modern literature; many consider him to be the greatest writer of his generation. <br><br>At Amherst, Wallace, son of James D. Wallace ’59 and Sally Foster Wallace, played on the tennis team and majored in English and philosophy. He wrote senior theses in both subjects and famously graduated with double <i>summa </i>honors. He found early success when his English thesis became the 1987 novel <i>The Broom of the System</i>. That year, he also served as a visiting instructor at Amherst. In 1999, the college awarded him an honorary doctor of letters degree.<br><br>“We want to believe that genius is … like some buoyant object,” Costello said in Johnson Chapel, “that you could release it at the bottom of any tub and it’ll always come up: take a boy and put him with repressive Jesuits and put him with a bunch of drunks, and he’s still going to come up James Joyce.” Wallace disagreed. As Costello explained, Wallace believed that everything was deeply contingent—that had he not been published in his 20s to immediate raves, “he might have been a philosophy teacher, and a good one; a high school teacher, and a good one; a literature professor, and a very good one, and perhaps he wouldn’t have been a genius.”<br><br>In the essays below, four people who knew Wallace at Amherst—his English thesis adviser, two friends and one former student—remember a young man who wrote his papers late at night when he couldn’t sleep, who played Bruce Springsteen’s “I'm Goin' Down” until the tape broke and who, even in college, possessed a “Dickensian genius for spawning new characters and newly devised connections among them.”</p><p><b><a href="/node/97026/">Like a Set of Old Clothes</a></b></p><p><b><a href="/node/97029/">Talking with Dave</a></b></p><p><b><a href="/node/97025/">The Start of Everything that Followed</a></b></p><p><b><a href="/node/97032/">The Teacher</a></b></p><p><span class="inline"><img class="image thumbnail" src="/media/view/15018/thumbnail/audio_icon_660066.gif" border="0" alt="audio" title="audio" width="16" height="12"></span>Visit Amherst’s <a href="/node/65728/">remembrance page for Wallace</a> and listen to an <a href="/media/view/75060/original/DFW_sm.mp3">audio recording</a> <br /><div style="position: relative; display: block; max-width: 300px">
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<br /> of the October 2008 celebration of his life and writing.</p> <p><span class="fine-print">Photo copyright Gary Hannabarger/Corbis. </span></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/177">in memoriam</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/288">Class of 1985</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/899">Washington</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1151">peterson</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4064">dale peterson</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/5025">David Foster Wallace</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9713">Wallace</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9714">Corey Washington</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9715">McLagan</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9716">C. McLagan</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9717">Dickman</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9718">Sue Dickman</a></div></div></div>Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:37:00 +0000kdduke96248 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2009winter/dfw/node/96248#commentsColloquium on "Race, Religion and Nationalism" Oct. 26-27https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/news_releases/2001/10_2001/node/18907
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="fine-print"> October 15, 2001<br> Director of Media Relations<br> 413/542-8417</span><p> AMHERST, Mass.—Three authors and members of the Amherst College faculty will offer a colloquium on “Race, Religion and Nationalism: Three Books” on Friday, Oct. 26, and Saturday, Oct. 27, in the Cole Assembly Room, Converse Hall at Amherst College. The authors are David Blight, Class of ‘59 Professor of History and Black Studies; Eddie Glaude, Jr., Visiting Associate Professor of Religion; and Dale Peterson, Professor of English and Russian. Sponsored by the Willis D. Wood Fund, the Dean of Faculty at Amherst College, the Departments of Religion and Black Studies at Amherst College and African-American Religion: A Documentary History Project, the colloquium will be open to the public at no charge.</p><p> At 3:45 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 26, the first session will focus on Eddie S. Glaude, the author of <em>Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century America</em> (2000). Commentators will be Professor Will B. Gravely (University of Denver) and Robert Gooding-Williams (Northwestern University). After this session a public reception will be held in the Converse Lobby at 6 p.m.</p><p> On Saturday, Oct. 27, from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. a session will be devoted to David W. Blight’s <em>Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American History</em> (2001). Commentators will be Professor W. Fitzhugh Brundage (University of Florida) and Professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Harvard University). </p><p> The third and final session, on Saturday from 1:30 to 3:45 p.m., will focus on Dale E. Peterson’s <em>Up From Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul</em> (2000). Commentators will be Professor Nancy Ruttenburg (New York University) and Valerie Smith (Princeton University). </p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/552">news releases</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1151">peterson</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1431">Black Studies</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1581">religion</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2537">Willis D. Wood Fund</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3264">david blight</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4064">dale peterson</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4803">Blight</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4804">Glaude</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4805">Eddie Glaude</a></div></div></div>Fri, 17 Aug 2007 16:43:26 +0000kdduke18907 at https://www.amherst.eduPeterson Compares Russian and African-American Soulhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/news_releases/2000/09_2000/node/9934
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="fine-print">September 20, 2000<br> Contact: Director of Media Relations<br> 413/542-8417</span><p> AMHERST, Mass. - Dale Peterson, professor of English and Russian at Amherst College, has just published <em>Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul</em> ($18.95 paper, 240 pp., Duke University Press, Durham), the first study to consider the evolution of Russian and African-American cultural nationalism in literature.</p><p> Peterson examines analogous moments in the formation of Russian and African-American uniqueness, and also explores the rather surprising affinities between African American and Russian thinkers and writers. He argues that many Russian writers and thinkers also experienced the "double consciousness" described by W. E. B. DuBois as an African-American phenomenon, while the creative response of African-American cultural theorists to the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin is only the most recent instance of a rich history of mutual awareness and artistic resemblance. </p><p> <em>Up from Bondage</em> has particular relevance for today's globalized culture. "The Russian and African-American experiments in developing a supple literary articulation of 'soul' and in imprinting cultural 'otherness' within the forms legitimated by Western letters and philosophy offer valuable precedents for our increasingly decentered and diversified world of disunited nationalities," Peterson writes. "Nationalists," says Peterson, "might finally heed the call to a proud hybridity that Dostoevsky and DuBois issued to their people more than a century ago."</p><p> <em>Up From Bondage</em> deals with writers as diverse as Turgenev, Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Maxim Gorky, Richard Wright and Gloria Naylor. The book also compares and contrasts the "New Negro" movement of the Harlem Renaissance with the Russian "Eurasianists" of the 1920's.</p><p> Dale Peterson, who studied history and literature at Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in American Studies and an M.A. in Russian Studies at Yale University, has taught at Amherst College since 1968.</p><p align="center">### </p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/552">news releases</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1151">peterson</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4018">Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul</a></div></div></div>Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:28:55 +0000daustin099934 at https://www.amherst.edu